The reason she does that is because these links spoil the ‘wheel’, but she doesn’t want to delete the links, because they’re good for users.

Some history:

When the rel-nofollow attribute came out, it was meant for links that got sold, but SEO’s also started using it to ‘sculpt’ pagerank. That is: to give link juice to those pages of their site that they felt were most important, at the expense of pages they did not value as much.

[S]ome crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).

So last year it was announced by Google that this strategy no longer works.

The new policy means that pagerank evaporates after using rel-nofollow. That is: it does NOT get redistributed to the followed links.

This also means that putting rel-nofollow on any links to your own content, is like throwing drinking water into the sea: it does nobody any good.

So – put your users first: link out to whatever content is relevant for them & make that more important than any link wheel. And please don’t punish yourself by rel-nofollowing links to your own content. AJ – Please?

BTW – I have a mashup of all the important SEO blogs on my SEO Mentor lens.